Frances Whitehead at Tough - Chicago, Illinois - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Frances Whitehead, a sculptor originally inspired through the industrial world, began gardening as a respite from urban life. Later her recreational activities became part of her studio practice. For Whitehead, the ecological round of yearss of renewal and decay metaphorically conjoin to history and memory, and in her use of materials she look fors to address that connection. Her work explores the relationship among the organic, the social and the physical, and includes artifacts from a pastoral sphere now marred through human intrusion--rosemary topiaries, for example, sheared into statements of los (Rue Amnesia), or deadly nightshade made into jam.

Her new project, Untitled (Actea artemesia/Artemesia absinthium), was a meditation upon nature and the baroque, where issues of beauty, exces and entropy played without in complex configurations. Named after the luna miller (actea artemesia) and the absinthe plant (artemesia absintheum), the installation incorporated these real-life organisms into sculptural constructions that together read as a kind of constellation, a collection of individual parts related by means of the larger shape the mind makes of them. Four colossal porcelain rounded pillars commanded the gallery's darkened center Their sinuous lines paid visual homage to Bernini's baldachin at St Peter's, at the same time their marred surfaces suggested architectural ruin.

Other constituents exploited the mutability inherent in their biological specimens. greatest in quantity minimalistic was a large cube built from thin slabs of crowded sugar. Overhead hung two glass tunnels one containing absinthe oil, the other water. These fluids ruthless in dribs and drabs, dissolving the geometric form below and emitting a suffocating still seductive perfume. Of course, absinthe is best known as the crucial ingredient in the addictive liquor whose drinkers were famously a control of early modernist painting; this quasi-laboratory set-up recalled the proces by means of which that liquor was frameed In another element of the piece, the vines of nine pott absinthe plants grew toward simulated natural light--a tropism that again emphasized the nerve of biochemical reactions, while inviting us to consider the ways in which man move rounds nature to his own ends

Various visual and conceptual links between the sum of two units artemesias were explored in a nearby projection. Behind a curtain cast in pine rosin was a cage filled with cocoon (and, above time, with live and dead moths) while a slide projector cast an image of a mature miller distorted into an amorphous shadow of pale absinthe virid Like the absinthe addict, the luna miller is decisively impelled by its be in possession of biological response to external stimuli--in its case, light. Here, Whitehead's intervention, at first an arcadian lament, became a rediscovery of nature end esthetic inquiry.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group